It has been a case of death by a thousand cuts in the ASX mining space of late. Nothing too drastic on a daily basis but tote the share price falls over the last week or month and the pullback has become telling.
Commodity prices haven’t tanked. It’s just that most have come off their early 2026 highs in response to global economic uncertainty caused by the stop-start war in Iran.
There is an exception though – lithium and the ASX lithium sector, with one or two notable laggards – has been on the march.
And so it should be with prices for the spodumene concentrate that Australia ships off to the rest of world for processing into battery material more than tripling from last year’s lows.
Sector leader PLS – its shares are up 20% in the past month – received US$703/t for its spodumene concentrate (on a 6% lithium equivalent basis) in the March quarter last year. In the March quarter just gone its realised price had shot up to US$2,155t.
With production running at 230,000t in the March 2026 quarter, the US$1,442/t price increase has a telling impact on revenue/profits. The thing is that spodumene concentrate is now trading higher still at $US2,455/t.
Supply in the market is tight due to the combination of production curtailments in China and Zimbabwe, which may or not be lasting, and the surge in demand from the battery energy storage systems (BESS) sector more than offsetting some current weakness in EV demand.
Weakness in EV demand is likely to be short-lived given a greater focus on energy security in the wake of the Iran war, further pressuring supply.
It is against that backdrop that that a market for direct shipping ore (DSO) in the lithium space has reappeared. It is reflective of the lithium convertors taking what they can get to supply the booming needs of the battery makers across the EV and BESS sectors.
Core Lithium (ASX:CXO):
Core is one to benefit from its Finniss project south-west of Darwin.
Finniss is being prepared for a resumption of mining and processing activities after being shuttered in 2024 when all lithium operations were struggling due to cyclically low prices brought on by temporary over-supply.
But now that lithium prices have come storming back, albeit still well short of historical highs, Core has seized the opportunity to sell 20,000t of DSO fines from the Finniss stockpile to Glencore’s trading arm for $A405/t.
It also plans to sell off the remaining 55,000t in the DSO stockpile. The spodumene concentrate stockpile at Finniss was sold off in February, with the combined $18m released from the DSO and concentrate sales supporting the Finniss restart.
The $18m involved is not a big number. But it does go to the depth and strength of the recovery in the lithium market, particularly as it relates to DSO.
Develop:
Bill Beament’s Develop (DVP) is another set to benefit from the return of demand for lithium DSO.
Develop’s Pioneer Dome project in WA is being readied to become a DSO producer ASAP.
“We are infill drilling the DSO open pit as we speak,’’ Beament said last week. “Results have been fantastic to date, and you’ll hear more on this in probably four or five weeks when we give a much fuller presentation on Pioneer Dome.’’
Beament said Develop had received 11 financing/offtake proposals for the DSO project.
“And there is no funky backyard operators in those 11 proposals,” he said. “Some of the world’s biggest end users and biggest commodity traders in this space are banging our door down.
“In the next four to six weeks, when we put out a few optics on the financials of Pioneer Dome, I think there is going to be a lot of very happy shareholders.”
He added that it could be a case of the first DSO shipment alone paying off the project’s capex. “There is nothing in our share price for this,” Beament said.
As to the sharp recovery in the lithium market, Beament is convinced it is sustainable.
“I think it looks sustainable moving forward on a post-Iran basis,” he said. “Everyone, including myself, now wants an electric car and solar panels on our roof, and a big battery.
“It’s only going to escalate getting off fossil fuels in the future. So, we are going to capitalize on that.”
Solstice Minerals (ASX:SLS):
Shares in Solstice (ASX:SLS) have continued on their merry way higher in response to latest drilling indicating that its Nanadie copper-gold project to the south-east of Meekatharra in WA has some serious depth extension potential.
Solstice closed 6% higher at $1.56 in response, with the gain likely restrained by the note of caution from the company that while visible copper sulphide has been intersected in the first of the diamond “tails” drilled at the property, assay results were 5-6 weeks away.
Still, it is not every day a drill hole extends a mineralised system at least 300m vertically below an existing mineral resource estimate of an inferred 40.4Mt at 0.4% copper and 0.1g/t gold for 162,000t of copper and 130,000oz of gold, on a mining lease to boot.
Specifically, the first of the diamond tails was drilled to a depth of 629.1m to extend an RC hole that had previously fired up the imagination in February with a 62m hit grading 1.55% copper and 0.66g/t gold.
At least 10 diamond tails are planned in the current campaign with an RC rig working on step-out exploration, MRE delineation and more “pre-collar” holes designed for diamond tails. Five RC holes have been completed with assays results available in 3-4 weeks. But again, observable geology at the deeper levels has been “consistent” with earlier RC drilling results.
Solstice only picked the project up in February last year when it was more of a gold explorer for a knockdown price of $1m and some shares. The company was valued by the market at the time at about $16m.
Things changed in a big way in February this year with the RC drilling results. As mentioned here at the time, Solstice doubled to $1.13 a share with a copper discovery-hungry market devouring the results on the day the RC results were announced.
At Thursday’s closing price of $1.56, Solstice’s market cap has grown to $268m, making it a 16.75 times bagger since the project was acquired.
